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Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 15:48:17 -0800 (PST)
From: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
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To: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>, Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>,
       akpm@osdl.org, linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org, torvalds@osdl.org,
       linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Extend clear_page by an order parameter
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On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, Paul Mackerras wrote:

> Christoph Lameter writes:
>
> > The zeroing of a page of a arbitrary order in page_alloc.c and in hugetlb.c may benefit from a
> > clear_page that is capable of zeroing multiple pages at once (and scrubd
> > too but that is now an independent patch). The following patch extends
> > clear_page with a second parameter specifying the order of the page to be zeroed to allow an
> > efficient zeroing of pages. Hope I caught everything....
>
> Wouldn't it be nicer to call the version that takes the order
> parameter "clear_pages" and then define clear_page(p) as
> clear_pages(p, 0) ?

clear_page clears one page of the specified order. clear_page cannot clear
multiple pages. Calling the function clear_pages would give a wrong
impression on what the function does and may lead to attempts to specify
the number of zero order pages as a parameter instead of the order.